I’ve been listening to a podcast called The Musician’s Cooler for a little over a year thanks to James. Today I heard a story that really freaked me out. There’s a band called Mobile that, obviously, secured the MySpace URL myspace.com/mobile a couple of years ago. Rather than build their own web site, they simply built up their MySpace page and pointed everyone interested in the band there. Big mistake.

Fast forward a couple years as cell phone browsers have become more sophisticated. Every major company wants to build a mobile platform. Yes, mobile. So the band Mobile gets a message saying that MySpace needs to use the URL myspace.com/mobile and the band’s URL is going to be changed in 48 hours. Now all of their fans who have that page bookmarked will have to search for them again to find their new URL. If they printed any business cards with that URL on it, they’re worthless.

I highly doubt that Myspace would launch any kind of service called “megaphone,” but you never know. This is just a scary example of what can happen when a free service has to take things back from its users. I guess there are two morals to this story: First, if you’re in a band or thinking of starting a band, get your own domain name. Don’t rely on a service like MySpace. Second, if you’re going to tell anyone about megaphone, tell them to come to this site! It’s cool to have a lot of friends on MySpace and Facebook and sites like that, but this is where people should come for info on the band.

Have you guys heard any stories like this?